On The Subject Of Refugees (And Something About Kim Davis)

The week has been a hard one. Early on, a dead little boy from Syria washed ashore in Turkey, and his image went viral. All of this happened while Kim Davis makes a fake stand for Christianity and religious freedom, which is what occupied the minds of the people of the United States. Hey, what are a couple dead children when our religious rights are being trampled, am I right?

Except no one’s religious rights are being trampled. Kim Davis isn’t making a stand for religious freedom, she’s trying to get out of doing the job she was elected to do. It’s a non-issue, so this is all the time it’s getting. Kim Davis was elected to follow the laws of the land as set forth by the Supreme Court. She refused to do those things, repeatedly, with gusto, and great amounts of media attention. She’s gone to jail, and is able to be released should she elect to do her job or at least resign from it. End of story, and not worth talking about.

What is worth talking about this week is the Syrian Civil War and the multitudes of refugees that are currently fleeing the country. What is worth talking about are the aforementioned dead children. One of whom made headlines this week, an untold number of which we will never actually know about. All over the world, people are opening their borders in one way or another to these displaced citizens of a nation torn in half. It’s just not enough.

Already, Prime Minister David Cameron has pushed the English equivalent of a Bill through the House Of Commons, which agrees that the UK will accept and rehouse 20,000 refugees over the course of the next year. In contrast, since the start of the Syrian Civil War, we have accepted referrals for 17,000 refugees, but only processed about 1,700.

Amy Klobuchar, a democratic senator out of Minnesota, has been putting pressure on the Obama administration to accept more refugees. Specifically, she and a collection of other senators, have written the administration asking to significantly increase the number of refugees housed in the U.S. to 65,000, saying that the State Department and DHS need to handle these cases, as opposed to how they are currently being handled, which is by Homeland Security.

Yes, as unsurprising as it is to find out just how similar we truly are to Australia and their foreign policy, the significant barrier facing most of these people, who have been displaced from their home, which they originally may have had no desire to leave, by bombs and violence, is racial profiling. They are brown skinned, and from a predominantly Islamic nation, so there must be some terrorists thrown into the mix.

That’s the truth. It’s hard for DHS to process these refugee requests because Homeland Security is breathing down their necks, insisting they be ridiculously, likely unconstitutionally thorough in looking into the backgrounds of each and every man, woman, and child. While organizations like ISIS and Al Quadea are 100% evil enough to do something like sneak a terror agent through with war refugees, I have to think the nervous man sans a family who holds a deep and true loathing of America would stick out amongst the people who are so desperate to leave their war-torn country, they are literally drowning in the waters off the coasts of some kind of freedom.

This isn’t new. The Syrian Civil War and its refugees are not a new thing to the world. It’s been going on since 2011, and people have been running since it began, but the world is just now paying attention and just now taking drastic action. All because we saw an image on the internet of a dead baby. It took something that terrible, which has to have happened before (and not just with Syrian refugees, either), to collectively focus us in on this terrible thing.

All over the world, people are opening their borders for the war-torn families. While some countries, and some people, are greeting them with hostility, Americans are barely able to do anything. We aren’t close by, so they can’t walk to us, and there is no affording boats. So write to your senators and write to our president and tell them that it’s high time the U.S. stopped hiding behind this idea that every Muslim is a terrorist, and act like the heroes we make ourselves out to be. We need to stop worrying about our borders so much and remember that this country is supposed to be a melting pot of culture and peoples, that the poem on the Statue of Liberty, calling to ‘give me your huddled masses yearning to breathe free’ is not just some throwaway line. We can actually help this time.